Using a Data Lake to Improve Data Storage, Integration, and Accessibility

As data continues to expand and organizations strive to extract value from it, data lakes will become a key way to unlock new systems of insight, intelligently manage data, and achieve competitive advantage.

Rapid data growth is forcing organizations across every industry to rethink many aspects of their data management strategies. Most of all, data expansion is driving demand for highly scalable, modern compute infrastructures capable of consolidating, storing, accessing, and processing big data.

The challenge for many organizations is that data isn’t just “big” anymore; it’s also flowing in quickly from a variety of sources and in many different formats. In the age of big data, converting data into value requires a high level of agility and the capability to ingest data from a multitude of locations and quickly prepare it for analysis. Data lakes are allowing organizations to leverage a single storage repository to hold large quantities of raw data in its original format, helping them to better store, manage, and protect various forms of unstructured data for both traditional and emerging workloads.

These benefits have quickly made data lakes an integral technology for a variety of enterprises and industries. Any business that wants to slash the costs and resources associated with preparing data for analysis, or aims to simplify data aggregation from many sources can find value in a data lake storage environment. Data lakes also allow businesses to easily store, analyze, and explore data in its original format, while offering users the opportunity to process new information faster and more effectively.

Successful companies are racing to implement data lakes to realize a number of improvements to their data management approaches:

Simplify data storage

In the face of continued data growth, it’s useless for organizations to invest in storage architectures that don’t scale. Data lakes can seamlessly scale to accommodate massive volumes, enabling organizations to meet data storage demands both now and in the future. Generally, today’s storage systems must pass the test of the 3 V’s of Big Data – Volume, Velocity, and Variety. Data lakes address all of these needs, ingesting and storing massive amounts of incoming data (Volume) at high speeds (Velocity) and in many different formats or sizes (Variety).

Streamline data integration

Data lakes eliminate information silos by seamlessly integrating data from different sources and providing users with a unified view of this data. With all the organization’s information merged into a single unified platform, it becomes fully accessible for analysis whenever it’s needed, allowing businesses to uncover new patterns, rapidly improve business processes, and become truly data-driven.

Improve data accessibility

As John Thielens, VP of Technology at Cleo recently pointed out, the promise of improved analytics and business agility is broken when data is not easily accessible, so companies must strive to have connected data. Data lakes unify massive data volumes and ready them for the next step in their lifecycle – whether that’s big data analytics or simply long-term storage.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and a network of partners can help organizations deploy solutions consisting of enterprise-grade Hadoop software and hardware purpose-built for the high demands of big data. The most demanding data storage environments require big data solutions able to support vast volumes of both structured and unstructured data. As data continues to expand and organizations increasingly strive to extract value from it, data lakes will become a key way to unlock new systems of insight, intelligently manage data, and drive competitive advantage.

Data lakes are one of the many HPC solutions helping organizations extract value from data. Please follow me on Twitter at @Bill_Mannel to stay up-to-date on the latest innovations helping today’s businesses succeed.

BillMannel

As the Vice President and General Manager of HPC and AI Segment Solutions in the Data Center Infrastructure Group, I lead worldwide business and portfolio strategy and execution for the fastest growing market segments in HPE’s Data Center Infrastructure Group which includes the recent SGI acquisition and the HPE Apollo portfolio.